March

So far in the month of March, Carnegie Mellon Media Relations has counted hundreds of references to the university in worldwide publications. Here is a sample.

Record mega millions numbers drawn in US | Jakarta Globe

March 31

On Friday, the lottery estimated that total ticket sales for this jackpot, which has been building up since Jan. 28, will be about $1.46 billion, said Kelly Cripe, a spokeswoman for the Texas Lottery Commission.

You’re about 20,000 times more likely to die in a car crash than win the lottery, but that doesn’t matter to most people.

“Part of it is hope. ... The average person basically has no chance of making it really big, and buying a lottery ticket is a way of raising the ceiling on what could possibly happen to you, however unlikely it may be,” said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied how rich and poor consumers make a choice to buy lottery tickets.

Imagining a census survey without a mandate | The Wall Street Journal's The Numbers Guy Blog

March 30

The mandatory nature of the ACS never has been enforced, yet some researchers say it is critical, citing Census Bureau tests from nearly a decade ago showing a big decrease in responses, particularly by mail, when the survey was labeled as voluntary. “We don’t have lots of data on what motivates people and what doesn’t,” said Carnegie Mellon University statistician Stephen E. Fienberg.

Fienberg added that the mandatory status may be even more important today, when there are so many other surveys being fielded. “There is a difference between saying, this is a crucial survey where the government has mandated the response, as opposed to all the other surveys the Census Bureau does, and all the other people doing surveys.” Fienberg said that “every time I go to my car dealer and have my car serviced, I get something called a survey. This is not helping the nation when it comes to data that really matter.”

Four ways to engage more young people in CSR | Forbes.com

March 27

Why don’t more young people know about what business is doing in this area? What can large corporations do to better communicate their CSR programs to younger audiences?

To find out more, I connected with Peter Madsen, Distinguished Service Professor for Ethics and Social Responsibility at Carnegie Mellon University, Danielle Narveson, Senior Strategist at Blast Radius, a strategic digital agency that “helps connect brands and consumers to tackle the complex issues of growing brand and revenue in a highly connected world,” and Jeffrey Puritt, President of TELUS International, the global arm of the Canadian telecom service provider.

What's at stake in the health care decision | American Public Media's "Marketplace"

March 26

Dimsdale: Well, we don't have reliable measure of costs since the law -- that was 2010 when it was enacted. But we do know that the runaway medical inflation that we saw in the 1990s, and around the turn of the century, has settled down.

Health economists, like Martin Gaynor at Carnegie Mellon University, say that's not due to the new health care law.

Martin Gaynor: Really what's driving that slow down is not any federal policy; state, local policy. Not the things government is or isn't doing. It's really just the recession overall the slowing in the economy.

Just how much is your privacy worth? | Technology Review India

March 21

When only one of the two vendors stated it would use the customer's e-mail address to send them advertisements, and both charged the same price for tickets, 62% of sales went to the privacy-friendly ticket retailer. But when the privacy-friendly vendor charged 50 euro cents more, its market share dropped to 13%.

"What people say in surveys is that they care about privacy, but what they actually do is spend their time constantly updating their status on Facebook," says Alessandro Acquisti, codirector of the Center for Behavioral Decision Research at Carnegie Mellon University, who was not connected with the new research. "This has led some to conclude that people no longer care about privacy. This new data, along with similar work we have done in the U.S., shows this is not the case, and that the desire for privacy is not dead after all."

Hybrid, electric or gas: What's a car buyer interested in the environment to do? | The Washington Post

March 19

You’re probably expecting an answer here: All things considered, are the new engines environmentally superior? Unfortunately, the answer is “It depends.” But there are some factors to consider when making this decision.

Jeremy Michalek, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, published a study on the relative impacts of these categories last year. He found that a variety of factors affect a car’s overall environmental impact. Some have to do with location, some with consumer behavior and some with manufacturing decisions beyond your control.

The number 1 reason top talent should leave your company | Forbes.com

March 19

Steven Klepper at Carnegie Mellon has spent his life studying how dysfunctional management spurs growth indirectly, and in the same context, why it is that big firms fail and why spin-offs function so much better than their parents.

Well, that’s not precisely true. He has spent his career looking at how firms become big, and then dysfunctional, where that spawns a benefit and where it brings sclerosis. In one aspect of it lies an immutable truth. Big companies dominate their ecosystems, they suck in competitors, they tempt in the growth firms, and as a result become blind to the need for innovation as a lifestyle. It has happened in tires, autos and television, to name but three industries.

Bypassing the password | The New York Times

March 17

Roy Maxion, a research professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, oversees research on “keystroke dynamics,” including the length of time a user holds down a given key and moves from one particular key to another.

How to find happiness on social networks | U.S. News and World Report

March 16

"We would ask people, 'Are you married?' 'Do you belong to social groups?' 'Do you belong to a church?' 'Do you have friends?'" says Sheldon Cohen, a relationship researcher and psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University. "The more they have, the better off they are," he adds.

Cohen rattles off a list of the ways social ties influence our well-being: "It predicts mortality. It predicts cardiovascular disease. It even predicts the recovery rates from cardiovascular disease. It predicts the progress of cancer. It predicts cognitive function [in later life]. It even predicts the common cold."

Signal poor on m-learning's impact | The Guardian

March 13

The Millee project, led by Matthew Kam at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, uses mobile-based games to support English language learning in a variety of low-income settings in India. Now in its eighth year and third major pilot, the research team has used a variety of approaches to evaluate the project and the way the technology is being used.

"What we're really trying to understand is how the participants use the mobile games in practice, rather than to what extent they use them according to how we expect them to use them," said Kam.

Real-time face recognition comes to your iPhone camera | CNNMoney.com

March 12

"Currently applications such as Klik tell you not to worry because it's through consent and just with your friends,' said Alessandro Acquisti, professor of IT and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College. "But in the long-run, there will be no technological barriers that would prevent something that could do this not just with your friends but anyone out in the wild."

Today's technology is not quite robust enough to snap a photo of someone on the street and instantly know who they are. Computer processors aren't fast enough to scan across billions of images in real time to match an offline face to an online photograph. To match two photos of unconnected people in the United States in real time would take four hours, according to Acquisti.

China's social networks hit by censorship, says study | BBC.co.uk

March 9

The study, reported in New Scientist, by David Bamman, Brendan O'Connor and Professor Noah Smith from the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon analyzed short messages sent via the Sina Weibo service.

The public programming interface to the Sina site let the trio grab 57 million messages sent between June 27 and September 30, 2011. Three months later they checked to see which messages disappeared from the service to identify which terms caught the attention of the censors.

The work showed that the social media censor was similar to the system overseeing Chinese web access.

Gas prices: How real is the damage? | Bloomberg Businessweek

March 8

Gas prices are especially conspicuous—posted in two-foot-high letters on thousands of street corners, so virtually everyone who drives can see prices increasing. “People tend to respond to things in a comparative fashion,” says George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “The salient comparison for gas prices is what they were in the recent past, not the real price historically.” When we do think about the past, he says, we remember that gas was cheaper but don’t recall that our salaries were smaller, too.